Aongus Hegarty, president of Dell EMEA, has admitted that Dell has no plans to enter the
smartphone industry as it is not the kind of technology that its customers need or expect it to
offer.

He said: “We did some tests in it, we did bring some products out and test them a couple of
years ago, so we always test and try things.

"But that’s not really an area our customers feel is important for us to provide – actual
smartphone hardware technology.

"What they absolutely are looking for us to do is manage the data, the accessibility of that
data and the breadth of devices from smartphones to tablets to PCs that companies use to access
their data.”

Although producing smartphones is not in Dell’s near future, the company will still provide
management solutions for workforces in need of mobile technology.

Hegarty explained: “We also wanted to make sure that we support all devices from a smartphone
point of view, because the more value we can bring to our customers is in the manageability to
securely access the data.”

Integrated solutions

As well as providing hardware and support for all devices, Dell has begun to focus on providing
enterprise solutions that encompass the entirety of the business.

David Thorpe, communications director for EMEA commercial business, points out that there is a
growing trend of enterprises, especially SMEs or mid-level, looking for an integrated solutions to
cut costs and downtime during instillation.

He said: “I think what we’re seeing is convergence. People would buy servers separately to
storage, separately to networking, separately to devices. But increasingly people want to manage
those as one and buy those as one.”

Hegarty explained that small and medium sized businesses look to Dell to provide these
end-to-end solutions, as they do not have the time or money to deal with several different
suppliers in each area.

Acquisitions and growth

In the last few years, Dell has driven its growth by acquiring other suppliers such as Quest,
SecureWorks and most recently StatSoft to provide enterprises with technology such as security,
networking and data management.

More on Dell

“You have to determine which areas will bring most value to your customers.” said Hegarty,
“We’ve invested £18bn over the last three to four years in 20 acquisitions, so we’re not shy to
invest significantly in areas.”

These acquisitions have given the company the opportunity to expand into new fields, such as
data analysis. Using companies it has acquired, such as Quest and Statsoft, Dell is able to provide
businesses with information about their data and how it is being used.

Hegarty said: “What good is that data if you’re not actually using it to analyse it to make
better business decisions?”

Financial services

Dell has even implemented a solution whereby businesses can invest in a Dell solution and pay
for it over an extended period of time.

Hegarty said: “We invested significantly over the last couple of years and launched Dell
Financial Services six months ago.”

He explained that Dell is able to finance end-to-end solutions by providing hardware and
software, as well as financial support to companies of any size, to allow them to pay for the
technology over a longer period of time after the solution has already been implemented.

These changes show significant progress since it re-privatised at the
end of last year and expanded its market share from PC manufacturing to software too. Despite
this, Hegarty explains that the hardware sector is still important to Dell.

“Next month we celebrate our birthday and we’ve been continuing to innovate around our desktop
products, around our notebook. We introduced Windows tablets, and our second generation of Windows
tablets more recently. ” He said, “All of those areas of our business have been highly invested in
and developed from an innovation point of view over the last number of years.”

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